Archive for November, 2017

John Smith’s “Imperialism” is aimed against what Smith calls the “Euro-Marxist” or “orthodox Marxist” tendency. This tendency holds that workers in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan are often more exploited than workers of the “global South”—previously called the colonial and semi-colonial countries and later the Third World—despite the far higher level of real and money wages in the countries of the “global North.”

Marxists who hold this view rest their case, at least in part, on the following quote from Marx that appears in Chapter 17 of Volume I of “Capital”:

” … it will be found, frequently, that the daily or weekly, &tc., wage in the first [more advanced—SW] nation is higher than in the second, whilst the relative price of labour, i.e., the price of labour as compared both with surplus-value and with the value of the product, stands higher in the second [less advanced—SW] than in the first.”

Marx writing in the sixties of the 19th century is saying that English workers could be more exploited than the wage workers of poorly developed capitalist countries. To fully understand the debate around this question, including John Smith’s stand, it is necessary to delve into value theory in general and the theory of surplus value in particular. In doing this, we will explore many questions in regard to both the nature of contemporary imperialism and value theory.